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From the Call for Papers:

Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art
The Association of Dress Historians International Conference
National Portrait Gallery, London, 7–8 October 2024

Proposals due by 28 April 2024

The Association of Dress Historians are delighted to introduce our two-day autumn conference for 2024 on the theme of Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art. The conference aims to bring together scholars, professionals, and practitioners to explore and examine the wide range of interconnections between dress, textiles, and painting across any culture or region of the world, from before classical antiquity to the present day.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
– Aileen Ribeiro, Professor Emeritus of the Courtauld Institute of Art
– Timothy McCall, Associate Professor of Art History at Villanova University
– Anna Reynolds, Deputy Surveyor of The King’s Pictures at Royal Collection Trust

Papers are invited that investigate, but are not limited to, any of the following prompts:
• The value (and limitations) of painted sources for historians of dress including portraits, genre scenes, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, and miniatures
• The reality (or otherwise) of clothing portrayed in paintings through comparison with extant garments, documentary sources, etc
• The practices of dressing up (e.g. fancy dress, professional robes) or dressing down (e.g. déshabillé) for portraits
• The symbolism of dress in paintings
• The role of clothing in interpretations of meaning or narrative
• Individual artists and their different approaches to depicting dress
• Artists’ involvement in decisions about what sitters should wear for portraits
• Artists’ personal attitudes to fashion and the selection of clothing worn in self-portraits
• Techniques used by artists to represent textiles and three-dimensional garments in paint
• The draped figure in painting, depictions of the clothed and unclothed body
• The role of the specialist drapery painter in artists’ studios
• Overlapping spheres of production in the raw materials for paintings and textiles e.g. pigments and dyes, linen canvas, animal hair
• Paintings as fashion illustration, and their role in the fashion design process
• Textile designs inspired by paintings
• Painters who were also fashion/textile designers
• Museum practices of exhibiting paintings alongside items of dress

We welcome submissions for 15- to 20-minute research presentations. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of no more than 200 words alongside a biography of no more than 50 words and an optional illustrative image* with caption to be included in an online programme to dressandpainting@dresshistorians.org by 00:00 BST on 28 April 2024. The conference is guest chaired by Anna Reynolds (Royal Collection Trust) and co-convened by Kirsten Burrall (Deputy Chair of ADH).

* Please send images as separate tiff or jpeg attachments and include the relevant caption beneath your abstract. Image captions are not included in abstract word count.